Cloudways Website Hosting Review

Cloudways is a managed hosting service that allows website owners to utilized managed hosting through several different very powerful server options at extremely affordable costs. Website owners can easily transfer their sites to Cloudways, or start from scratch completely for free without adding credit card information. Cloudways can help with various content managmeent systems like: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Koken, Magento, Media Wiki, PHP Stack, and Prestashop.

 

Our Testing

So why is an outdoor website writing a review on Cloudways? Well first off, we have two major passions, the outdoors, and digital marketing. We’ve used tons of hosts, and personally, as the owner and founder of this website, I also work with clients across the country of various sizes as a full time marketing strategist.

So not only have we experimented with several hosts at hikingandfishing.com, we have dealt with literally hundreds of other websites utilizing tools like Digital Ocean, Cloudways, WPEngine, Bluehost, Nexess, Hostgator, and dozens of others. Basically, we’ve tried a lot, and we think our opinion is valuable on this topic.

 

Where To Purchase

You start your trial of Cloudways on their website: Cloudways

Disclaimer, the above is an affiliate link. Meaning, if you become a cloudways partner, we will get a kickback at no cost to you. If you’d like to support our site, please purchase through that link! We are really only writing about cloudways because we loved it though, that’s it. Our goal here is to be as objective as possible.

 

About Cloudways

We can’t tell you too much about Cloudways aside from what they tout on their website. They have over 80 thousand customers, and were listed as the top hosting provider on G2 in 2021. In addition, they have 24/7 customer service that has been extremely helpful in our experience. What does this tell you? Simply put, they have a lot of customers, and this is a reputable brand and company.

 

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About Hosting

In this review – we aren’t going to hit on every single thing, but we are going to highlight what sold us, and what has been extremely effective for us.

 

Key Features

 

Choice Of Platform

Cloudways allows you to choose between Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services, VULTR, Linode, and Google Cloud. This means that they can support just about any type of organization with a server that is optimized for exactly what you need. For most website owners, especially wordpress users, Digital Ocean will be the optimal choice. It’s about as fast as it gets, without spending an arm and a leg.

 

Quality Of Servers

They have servers optimized for exactly what you need. Basic wordpress site? No problem. Woocommerce and giant? No problem at all. Through digital ocean, you can select the sizing you need, optimized for what you are looking for. Have questions? Their support team can point you in the right direction as well. And they respond quickly.

 

Pricing

You cannot get better servers for cheaper. At least we have never found them. We are spending half as much as Kinsta, with even better performance. And Kinsta is renowned as one of the fastest and best managed hosting services on the planet, but we used Kinsta, switched Cloudways, and cut our average site speed substantially.

Digital Ocean servers range from $10 / month to over $1,000 per month depending upon the size you need.

 

Scalability

Scaling your server size couldn’t possible be easier. You use a slider, and hit confirm. That’s about it, and boom, you have an upgraded server. We are sitting at over 100,000 monthly visitors, with a woocommerce store, and our site rips. When we need to, hopefully soon, we will scale up at the click of a button.

 

24/7 Support

We had some questions after we launched our site. SSL certificate items, image CDN, cloudflare questions, and more. They literally responded with a human in minutes, and we chatted through issues, and were incredibly helpful each time. They support team knows what they are doing, and so far, we are thoroughly impressed.

 

Performance

Quite frankly, our site is lightning fast. We are faster than our competitors, and we are faster than our own site when it was on Kinsta – paying half as much in hosting. Is this the best performing hosting possible? Probably not. But in our opinion, this is as good as it gets in terms of value. Don’t believe us? Run this blog post through a speed test.

 

User Friendliness

Overall, the user interface of Cloudways is solid. It isn’t as buttoned up as other managed hosting providers like Kinsta or WPEngine, but it is easy to use, and works well.

 

Backups

Setting up backups is very easy. It is also easy to change the cadence, schedule, and how long the backups are stored.

 

What Are The Downsides?

Cloudways isn’t the simplest host compared to one click wordpress installs at BlueHost or Hostgator – but the performance is way better, the costs are comparable, and it is only a touch more difficult. If you are a little technically savvy, they will work for you, but if you have zero experience launching a site in your past, it may be better to go with a simpler host. That being said, we would recommend learning through trial and error.

The only other downside in our opinion was that they didn’t accept PayPal or Discover, so we had to pay with our Visa. Not a big deal, but worth noting.

 

Recommendation And Overall Thoughts:

Overall, we highly recommend cloudways. It is probably the single best valued managed hosting service we have found on the market.